Designer and educator Victor Papanek (1927-1999) was a
strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and
community infrastructures. He disapproved of manufactured products that were unsafe, showy, maladapted, or essentially useless.
His products, writings, and lectures were collectively considered an example and spur by many designers. Papanek was a
philosopher of design and as such he was an untiring, eloquent promoter of design aims and approaches that would be sensitive to
social and ecological considerations. He wrote that "design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and
environments (and, by extension, society and himself)."
Early Life
Papanek was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1927. He attended public school in England and emigrated to the U.S. where he studied design and architecture. Papanek worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949.
He earned his Bachelor’s degree at Cooper Union in New York (1950) and did graduate studies
in design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.A.
1955).
Papanek was interested in humankind as such and pursued an interest in anthropology,
living and working for several years with Navajos, Inuit,
and Balinese. Indeed, Papanek felt that when design is simply technical or merely
style-oriented, it loses touch with what is truly needed by people.
Career
"One of my first jobs after leaving school was to design a table radio," Papanek wrote in Design for the Real World.
"This was shroud design: the design of external covering of the mechanical and electrical guts. It was my first, and I hope my
last, encounter with appearance design, styling, or design ‘cosmetics’." And further, he opined: "Only a small part of our
responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics."
In the same book, Papanek wrote: "Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs
of man have often been neglected by the designer."
Victor Papanek taught at the Ontario College of Art, the
Rhode Island School of Design, Purdue
University, the California Institute of the Arts (where he was
dean), and other places in North America. He headed the design department in the Kansas City Art Institute from 1976 to 1981. In 1981 he became the J.L. Constant Professor of
Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas. He also worked, taught, and
consulted in England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Finland and Australia.
Papanek created product designs for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Volvo of Sweden contracted him to design a taxi for the disabled.
With his interest in all aspects of design and how they affected people and the environment, Papanek felt that much of what
was manufactured in the U.S. was inconvenient, often frivolous and even unsafe.
He worked with a design team that prototyped an educational television set that could be utilized in the developing countries
of Africa and produced in Japan for $9.00 per set (cost in 1970 dollars). His designed products also included a remarkable
transistor radio, made from ordinary metal food cans and powered by a burning candle, that was designed to actually be produced
cheaply in developing countries. His design skills also took him into projects like an innovative method for dispersing seeds and
fertilizer for reforestation in difficult-to-access land, as well as working with a design team on a human-powered vehicle capable of conveying a half-ton load, and another team to design a very
early three-wheeled, wide-tired all-terrain vehicle.
As Papanek traveled around the world, he gave lectures about his ideas for ecologically sound design and designs to serve the
poor, the disabled, the elderly and other minority segments of society. He wrote or co-wrote eight books. How could the designer,
who must (like others) make a living actually serve ‘real needs’ of human beings? “I have tried to demonstrate that by freely
giving 10 percent of his time, talents, and skills the designer can help.” In other words, a willingness to volunteer. [Design
for the Real World, page 60.]
Papanek received numerous awards, including a Distinguished Designer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. The next year he received the IKEA Foundation International Award.
Books
- Papanek , Victor (1971). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, New York, Pantheon Books . ISBN
0-394-47036-2.
- Papanek , Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1973). Nomadic furniture: how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that
folds, collapses, stacks, knocks-down, inflates or can be thrown away and re-cycled, New York, Pantheon Books . ISBN
0-394-70228-X.
- Papanek , Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1974). Nomadic Furniture 2, New York, Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-70638-2.
- Papanek , Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1977). How things don't work, New York, Pantheon Books. ISBN
0-394-49251-X.
- Papanek , Victor (1983). Design for Human Scale, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0-442-27616-8.
- Papanek , Victor(1995). The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World, New York, Thames and Hudson. ISBN
0-500-27846-6.
External links
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